Saber Healthcare Group
"Before Smart Sourcing, they [recruiters] had to rely just solely on what applicants came through job postings. And now they can be more proactive and look for people that are on the database that maybe didn't necessarily see our job posting."
Nancy Pehanic, Director of Talent Acquisition
Indeed’s Smart Souring and Sourcing Assistant gives Saber Healthcare Group a more proactive way to hire at scale
Summary
- Problem: Saber is a large senior care organization hiring across roughly 164 affiliated locations. They have facility-level recruiters who wear many hats and need help with proactive sourcing.
- Solution: Indeed Smart Sourcing and Sourcing Assistant added AI-driven automation, giving Saber broader, more proactive access to candidates.
- Result: Saber quickly saw stronger positive response rates, plus a high interest in utilization by their team.
Background
Saber Healthcare Group is an organization that provides consulting services to 164 locations and over 19,000 employees. Its largest hiring need includes RNs, LPNs, nursing assistants, and a wide range of ancillary roles.
Nancy Pehanic, Saber’s Director of Talent Acquisition, leads a central team of four, while each community handles its own floor-staff recruiting.
Challenge
Before Nancy’s team put an ATS in place, Saber didn’t really have an applicant pool, good metrics to understand applicant flow, or insight on the effectiveness of sourcing tool. She also said the legacy sourcing workflow was not widely understood or consistent.
Saber’s requirements for a solution were clear:
- The tool had to work for a distributed recruiting structure, not just for a few individually assigned seats.
- It had to help recruiters become more proactive, rather than relying only on whoever applied through a posting.
- It had to reduce manual sourcing effort for teams with limited time.
"The ability to have a program where it doesn't have to be individual community-based, that allows me to purchase on behalf of the company and allow multiple users to us has been a game changer."
Director of Talent Acquisition, Saber Healthcare Group
Saber Healthcare Group
Solution
The first turning point was structural. Nancy said that moving away from individual community-based access and toward a company-managed model was “a game changer” because it made sourcing easier to manage across a large organization. Enterprise licensing solved the pain of buying facility by facility for a network with 140-plus facilities.
The second turning point was automation. One HR manager told Nancy that Smart Sourcing and Sourcing Assistant were helpful because it sourced for her, saving time in the candidate search process.
Nancy summarized the shift simply: before Smart Sourcing, recruiters had to rely solely on applicants who came through job postings; now they can proactively search the database for people who may not have seen the job or who are only passively looking.
The Results
In an early pilot, 10 users sent 391 contacts and reached a 31.46% positive response rate, compared with a 26.72% baseline without Sourcing Assistant. Later, Saber also saw seven Sourcing Assistant users drive 115 of 235 Smart Sourcing applications in the measured period. Together, those numbers highlight a workflow that improved response quality while allowing a relatively small group of users to create outsized pipeline impact.
| Before | After with Indeed | |
|---|---|---|
| Sourcing motion | Recruiters largely relied on inbound applicants from job postings. | Recruiters can proactively search for candidates who may not have seen the posting or are only passively looking. |
| Access model | Individual seat management. | Company-level contact purchasing. |
| Positive response rate | 26.72% baseline without Sourcing Assistant in an early pilot. | 31.46% positive response rate after 10 users sent 391 contacts with Sourcing Assistant. |
| Recruiting cost pressure | Communities had to rely more heavily on external agency usage or absorb overtime/payroll pressure. | Communities using Smart Sourcing and Sourcing Assistant effectively reduced agency usage or reduced overtime and payroll dollars. |
Key Results:
- More proactive recruiting: Saber’s teams are no longer limited to waiting for inbound applicants.
- Less manual sourcing work: AI-driven sourcing saves time because it does the bulk of sourcing work for them.
- Better organizational fit: Broader access and AI-based usage have made Smart Sourcing more utilized than it was before those changes.
Nancy said increased applicant flow can help reduce external agency usage, overtime, and payroll pressure. For a large healthcare company balancing lean recruiter capacity with constant hiring demand, that is not a marginal improvement. It is operational relief.
